PUBLIC MARKS from user karlcow with tag geolocation

The following maps are the first of a series that will be made in order to map out the distinct geographies of Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles (about half a million) are either about a place or an event that occurred within a place, and most of these geographic articles handily contain a set of coordinates that can be imported into mapping software.

BlockChalk is the voice of your neighborhood. Use your mobile phone to leave messages on your block, your street, at the coffee shop, or anywhere you happen to be. Respond privately or publicly to messages from people in your neighborhood. It's easy: you don't even have to sign up.

People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it's not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.

Geoplanet is a database of 5.4 million places in a hierarchy. Each entry has a unique, permanent ID (WOEID), a name and a place type. For example, Homerton (20089379) is a Suburb in the London Borough of Hackney (12695808), which is a LocalAdmin in London (44418), which is a Town in Greater London (23416974), and so on.

On November 4-5, 25 Real Good Chairs will be dropped around NYC. Many chairs will be GPS-enabled. You can follow their journeys here.

karl — 4:14 AM on October 22, 2009 Reply to this comment

Hmmm…

In the available doc, I have not seen any geolocation UI for the photos by picking up a location on a map. See Flickr system and/or HoudahGeo http://www.houdah.com/houdahGeo/

Is it really the case?

n the same vein, our goal is to capture the world’s geography as it is used by the world’s people.

A bare bones locative media server and client that lets users share their favorite places edit

Clarke is a small OS X application for updating your Fire Eagle location quietly, in the background. On Leopard (10.5) it uses Skyhook's API to triangulate your position from nearby wireless access points. On Snow Leopard (10.6) it uses Core Location. It's free, and the source code is available on Github.

flickr_logo.pngFlickr just announced support for OpenStreetMap, the wiki-like mapping service that allows users to create and edit maps. Starting today, photos that are tagged with an OpenStreetMap node ID will include a link to OpenStreetMap (OSM) right underneath the photo. OSM assigns a random number to objects on its maps and Flickr can now read this number and also extract additional data about places from the OSM database. In addition, Flickr also announced that it will now support venue ID tags for the increasingly popular Foursquare service.

In Snow Leopard, you can ask for the computer's location. Without a GPS, how accurate could that be? The answer in my case is: very accurate. In this post, I'll show you how to write a CoreLocation app for the Mac that shows the current location in Google Maps, so you can see exactly where your computer thinks it is.

social location games are titles which interact with your location and are sensitive to your surroundings, adapting to where you are. For example, it might mean that, if you are on a boating trip, the system will give you in-game activities that are linked to fishing or water sports.

Welcome to Wikitude, the Augmented Reality (AR) platform which allows you to browse the world and helps you discover information about places and points of interest around you.

This small mashup uses YQL to combine the power of Flickr and Yahoo! Placemaker. Copy and paste some text into the textbox below and click the button — application will first geo-locate all places in the text, and then will try to find photographs, published under Creative Commons license, which were geotagged at or near found places.

These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services.

You can read the full API documentation here: BlockChalk API v0.6

So what does this mean? It means that BlockChalk is now more than just a nifty GPS app for your iPhone. It’s an open platform for storing and accessing user-generated content within a geographic context.

What makes the BlockChalk platform unique?

* It’s dead simple. There are no badges, medals, points, unicorns, pirates, or other viral gaming craziness. BlockChalk is about locations and the messages people leave there, that’s it.

“It’s a good way to get exercise and see the city,” said Mr. Montelongo, who is working on a series of GPS drawings based on the beloved video games of his youth. “You end up going on these streets that you would never otherwise go down.”

Although the tools work, there's a downside compared to iPhoto's built-in Flickr support. iPhoto has wonderful geotagging support, as does Flickr, but iPhoto doesn't write the data to EXIF tags and that poses a problem for the tools. Uploadr reads just the files and so never sees the data, and apparently iPhoto doesn't provide the data to FlickrExport, either. The result is that Flickr won't know the locations of the photos.

Never knowing when a strike of inspiration will cause me to work until late at night (or early in to the morning), I always wanted an application that could tell me where I could grab a cup of coffee or bite to eat where I was, when I was looking, be it 1pm or 1am. So, I decided to write such an application, with the Google Gears Geo-Location API to determine location, geolocation to search for nearby businesses, and Google Maps for easy visualization.

GeoREL is now an ISO standard. The most visible efforts of the working group involved a pilot for ORCHESTRA, an effort to outline some possible licenses. The group extended the existing Creative Commons licenses with a few extra licenses to cover non-disclosure, commercial use and emergency use.

Learn how to build mapping applications using GeoDjango, the leading open source geographic web framework.

The most distinctive feature of GPS MapCard is that it can display a photo and a map on the same screen and shows an address based on its coordinates. Additionally, it displays date & time and a user comment as well on the map.

In what circumstances is it better to distance yourself from the crowd, to highlight your unique circumstances?

Images of the fallen building were quickly posted to photo-sharing sites Twitpic (Twitpic) (here and here) and Yfrog (here and here). But what makes this story more intriguing is that the imagery on Google Maps Street View clearly shows a large crack running up the front of the building (below)

I feel a lot of anger and frustration in this list.

Some of the items seem fine to me. I would not have written them like this ;). I disagree strongly with the last one, not because of the rationale but the form. It’s an unproven affirmation. There will be cases where it will be indeed the case and some not. :)

About geolocation privacy, the issue has hit the fan already ;) Advertising the user’s location is one way to make aware the user (or users in developping countries) of a mobile device. Blocking access to the location is *not always* a solution either. Sometimes the solution will be in how long the data can be kept, sometimes the solution will be in how the data will be used.

Repeat after me 1000 times: It is not a privacy issue, but a lack (or very thin) opacity issue. The network makes the access to information very quick and easy. There’s no need or no use to block it. There is need to be able to slow down the stream at will.

I Am Here Map is a Javascript library to create and embedded map to find the

latitude and longitude of a point, using the ModestMaps Javascript API.

It also supports geocoding, reverse-geocoding and automagic client positioning

using a variety of geolocation providers as well as the ability to display shape

contours for locations that have been reverse-geocoded.